Carrie discusses living with a restless, ruminating mind during life transitions, explains the default mode network, and offers practices to notice thoughts, question whether they're facts or stories, and choose action or rest within a supportive community context.
Carrie greets viewers, reintroduces herself as a contributor, references last week's live for background, and asks participants to rate how they're feeling in the chat to set context for the session.
Carrie highlights Mental Health Awareness Week and World Mental Health Awareness Day, linking the Cadre community's purpose to building support and reminding viewers that mental health exists on a continuum.
Carrie names the session 'what happens when your mind simply will not turn off' and shares personal stories of rumination, explaining her own struggles with a restless mind and the prison-like feeling of persistent negative thoughts.
Carrie describes her current life transitions, feelings of imposter syndrome and self-doubt while building a business, and introduces the default mode network to normalize inward, ruminative thought patterns.
Carrie suggests not fighting thoughts but instead questioning whether they're facts or stories, embracing balance between striving and rest, and invites viewers to notice their minds, decide on needed actions or rest, and give themselves permission to pause.
Carrie reiterates community support during Mental Health Awareness Week, reminds viewers they don't have to do everything to be enough, thanks them for tuning in, and invites them to join next week's live.
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today for my second live stream. If you didn't join last week, my name is Carrie Heimer and I am excited to be one of the cadre contributors. If you go back and listen to last week's live, you'll hear more about my experience, both from a professional standpoint as well as my mental health lived experience. But thanks for joining again. If you wouldn't mind, just in the chat how you're showing up today on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being this is the best day ever, one being I could barely get out of bed today.
It just helps me better understand how you're arriving in this moment. One thing I wanted to mention is next week is Mental Health Awareness Week and October 10th is World Mental Health Awareness Day. And one of the themes for Mental Health Awareness Week is building community, supporting mental well-being together. And I thought how fitting that is given that's what we're doing at Cadre. We're building community so nobody feels like they have to do this alone. Something we all have is mental health.
It just operates on a continuum and some seasons are okay and some seasons are incredibly hard. And so today I want to start with something I know really, really well. That's the title of my lie was what happens when your mind simply will not turn off. And I have a hunch that many on this call can relate to that. Maybe you're completely physically exhausted, but yet your mind is ruminating on something that happened in the day and it's decided it's a great time to hold a meeting. That happened to me last night, actually.
I could not turn my brain off. So if you heard my introduction last week, I did share about my lived mental health experience. And one of the things that I would summarize it all to say that for many, many years I lived as a prisoner in my own mind. While I was not constrained physically by the bars of a prison, I felt locked in by the thoughts that swirled in my head. Many of them were the same old narrative, you're not doing enough, you are not enough. And I worked hard at it and I still continue to work hard at it to fight those thoughts, to escape that prison of my mind.
In some seasons, it works great and I'm feeling better. In other seasons, it's a challenge. So what I wanna talk to you about today is just, I am in a season right now of feeling like some of those thoughts, that old narrative is popping up again from time to time. I'm in a season of building. I shared that I retired early from my CHRO role to care for my mom and what I'm doing now is I'm working hard with my husband to build a business. And with that comes a lot of thoughts of imposter syndrome, self-doubt, worry about am I doing enough?
Do I have something of value to offer? Am I moving fast enough? Should I have accomplished more by now? And underneath those thoughts, I sometimes recognize those old familiar patterns that are showing up. So even though the circumstances of my life have changed, I clearly have some of those same thought patterns that pop up. There's actually something interesting about neuroscience that has helped normalize this a bit for me. Researchers call this the default mode network, which is a group of brain regions that are involved when our attention turns inward.
So maybe I'm thinking about the past, maybe I'm worried about the future, or I'm thinking about myself. So I really spending all of my time anywhere but in the present. And so I'm learning that there's something that I shouldn't do and that's try to fight those thoughts, but recognize that I don't have to follow those thoughts. So when my mind says you're not doing enough fast enough, I'm practicing something just a little bit different and I hope that this will be helpful to you. Instead of arguing with it, I say, is that a fact?
or is that a story that I'm telling myself again? I recognize that I can be excited about building something new and not have it all figured out. I can want to make progress and I can also be okay with resting. I can have things left on my to-do list and still feel like I have done enough for today. And so what I want to invite you to do this week is just acknowledge what your mind is doing when you find yourself kind of stuck and your mind won't turn off. Am I worrying? Am I planning? What is my mind telling me?
And then say, well, what do I need to do right now about it? And maybe there is an action that you need to take, but maybe what you need is rest, some connection with others. or simply permission to be done for today. And that's my invitation to you this week. As we recognize Mental Illness Awareness Week, I hope we're reminded that none of us have to do this alone. And I'm going to be reminding myself of this along with you all this week, that I don't have to do everything today to be enough today.
And I hope you can do that as well. Thank you so much for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you next week.
